Thursday, 12 April 2012

This is your (liturgical) life...

I think I may be getting the hang of liturgical life...After Holy Week there was a chance of a short break away. The change of perspective was everything. I was feeling much too religious around Easter - couldn't stop thinking about church. What I needed was a Dorset pink sky, some hills and the restless sea.This post- Easter Sunday time of year feels like the top of a mountain that was sometimes arduous to climbduring Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, all the way up to Resurrection. Now it's hopefully the greener downhill slopes of Easter-tide, Pentecost and finally Trinity Sunday and the long Spring/late Summer of Ordinary Time.

I used to have a low church despair of Anglicanism's insistence on giving every day things religious names. I still can't get used to 'Holy Saturday'. Don't we all need a breather between 'Good' Friday and Easter Day? I can't seem to cope with anything religious on that day. Please no liturgy. Just silence.

But people like to claim ownership I suppose, so inevitably anything that wasn't Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent or Easter-tide was going to be christened 'Ordinary Time'.

But now I quite like the idea. I'm sure God can be found there. During Ordinary Time I want to remember there is no sacred/secular divide. But I'm running ahead of myself in my new found attachment to liturgical time...Easter-tide goes on for weeks yet...

In our family we have two Christmas birthdays (bad planning); two Easter birthdays - and me in June - right near Trinity Sunday. Then we have no birthdays for exactly six months till it all starts again in December. We're always either celebrating or recovering.